You can almost see those end-of-year political brain-teasers taking shape already. In 2006, what linked David Garrard, Barry Townsley and Gulam Noon? What did LA Galaxy, William Wilberforce and Eagle's Nest have in common? Why did Lord Cashpoint have to go back for more?

And yet, as the finer details of the loans-for-peerages scandal and of John Prescott's embarrassing rodeo ranch getaway begin to blur in the memory over the summer, one simple verdict deserves to remain. It was delivered on the Today programme on Thursday. And it consisted of Lord Falconer telling John Humphrys, after a long and repetitive line of questioning: "This is playing games. This is embarrassing for both of us."

It is beyond argument that the award of peerages has always been a cynical business. Ditto that Britain's party-political funding system is unsustainable. And also that John Prescott is a busted flush. All these things are true and, in context, serious. But there is much more to politics and government than this. Yet our political culture doesn't want to know. It seems incapable of getting out of second gear.

This has been a week, after all, in which politics has emphatically not been about games but about the real thing. The Middle East has taken a sharp turn for the worse. What appears to be Islamist terrorism has been brutally unleashed on a country with impeccable anti-imperialist credentials. And the UK government has announced a major strategic rethink on the country's long-term energy needs.

And yet what, for most British journalism this week, has been "the question that just won't go away" - aka the question we prefer to go on asking anyway? Not the Middle East, Islamist terrorism or whether the lights will stay on. Instead you have a choice of: "Why didn't John Prescott declare the gift of a stetson?", "Who else has he slept with?" or "Are the police going to question Tony Blair about Labour loans?" In this political culture, the closest we get to putting it all into perspective is episode 952 of the "When will Blair go?" saga.

Yet to pretend that Prescott's foolishness, Michael Levy's fundraising or even Blair's hold on the prime ministership are the biggest questions currently facing this country is pathetic. None of these things is remotely the case. Britain is not a country in political crisis. This is not a nation governed by incompetents. Our political system is not corrupt.

And yet the daily, hourly messages of our times remorselessly say the opposite. In the excited aftermath of Levy's arrest on Wednesday, one of the corporation's finest pronounced on BBC News 24 that if the prime minister was now to be questioned by the police it would be "hard to imagine a more explosive story in British politics". Really? It takes a nanosecond to see the hyperbole. Yet it spoke for the way we do politics in 2006. Falconer was spot-on. We are indeed playing games. Embarrassing is exactly what this is.

The nerve of outrage matters. It is of course entirely possible that someone in the Labour machine really did offer peerages in return for loans and that proof will be found. Prescott may indeed have concealed politically compromising backhanders in defiance of propriety and his obligations. And these episodes, whether proven or not, may eventually prise Blair out of Downing Street before he wishes. If they occurred these would be locally explosive events.

But the public facts do not at present point that way. It's not what the private conversations, for what they are worth, suggest either. In the absence of further revelations, it looks as if Labour - following the Conservatives and along with the Liberal Democrats - exploited a loophole in the political-finance laws and subsequently rewarded supporter-backers with honours. Unattractive? Absolutely. Counterproductive? You bet. But illegal? Not yet. As someone who knows Levy well put it to me this week: "It's not an offence to be annoying."

Similarly Prescott. The deputy prime minister's list of misjudgments and misdemeanours is too long, but it's mostly small stuff. He seems to have been let down by his officials. Prescott can be a nasty man, treats women badly, and has been tried and found wanting as a minister. The imminent August ritual of him "walking up Downing Street with his testicles clanking underneath him", as one minister describes it, has intensified a strong party-wide demand for him to go now - which he should do. But Prescott is not a criminal; he is just a failure.

Whatever else you can say about Blair, dismissing him as a failure is hardly one of them. In the past couple of months alone the government has taken on two of the largest long-term issues facing the country - pensions and energy - and in each case has pushed through a balanced, practical and principled new strategy. In a more minor key this week there was something similar on the future of legal aid. Across most of Whitehall there is no shortage of momentum. With the exception of the Home Office, where headline-chasing still trumps strategic thought, ministers get on with governing and tackle big issues thoughtfully. It's David Cameron, not Blair, whose responses look short of political heft these days.

The proverbial visitor from Mars would conclude that this is a re-elected government doing its job. She would note that the prime minister definitely aims to hand things over in good order to his obvious successor this time next year. But the Martian would be light years away from the current realities of Planet Westminster. Here too many Labour MPs and ministers compulsively parade their own wounds rather than acknowledging that timetable and making it work. It's a form of collective madness that feeds and is fed by what Max Clifford, a reliable witness, last week told a parliamentary audience was "the most savage media in the world".

France is bored, announced Alphonse de Lamartine shortly before the revolution that carried away the last French king in 1848. An editorial in Le Monde presciently repeated that phrase in March 1968, and a few days later the streets of Paris were full of barricades and rioting. Today there is something of that mood in British political life too. Britain is bored. There is a yearning for a different kind of politics - or perhaps for no politics at all. That's why I say be careful what you dream for, lest your dreams come true.